Forget putting a bird on it. Put on a dinosaur on it for a surefire hit in our market-driven economy. Director Stephen Spielberg certainly didn’t skimp on the “terrible lizards” when adapting Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the screen, and things turned out pretty well for him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich really are different from you or me. They’re more likely to behave unethically.
That’s the finding of a group of studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Click for larger image
Americans sometimes complain that, unlike the currency of many other countries, which feature portraits of artists, scientists, and writers, U.S. dollar bills don’t tend to feature intellectuals.

They sound like something out of science fiction, but Bitcoins are getting just a little bit more real every day. They’re intangible and invisible, but bitcoins recently attracted some real investment capital from the Winklevoss twins, who first dreamed up the idea for Facebook — or so their lawsuit argued.

Hans Rosling knows how to make a concise, powerful point. His mastery of statistics and visual aids doesn’t hurt. Behold, for instance, the Karolinska Institute Professor of International Health visualizing the health of 200 countries over 200 years with 120,000 data points.

Tireless New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman has long played the role of Cassandra, warning of disasters while the architects of policy look on, shake their heads, and ignore him. I’ve sometimes wondered how he stands it.

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About Us

Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.